I got about 12 years in the Canadian oilpatch. If you go to work in this industry, you must wear a hard hat. It's the law!

About half the guys I worked with would have preferred not to wear a hard hat. Somehow they believe that they would never be knocked on a noggin with a piece of steel. When you try to point a particular instance out where they did get hit, they say: "If I wasn't wearing a hard hat, I would have seen the flying steel coming at me and I'm quick enough to get out of the way."

My experience is that I probably had a minor bump on the noggin once a month that would have turned into an injory without the hard hat.

The same mentality about hard hats in the oilpatch is there for masks during a pandemic. Such a minor inconvenience for so much protection. I would like to say too many people are stupid, but I think it's more of a case of not caring, even for their own safety.